“A mission from God?” I smiled winningly. Old movies, I loved them. I’d been waiting a long time to use that line with Eden House.
After that, Goodman didn’t speak to me anymore while we were on the plane. It was for the best. He annoyed me, and I couldn’t spare the concentration right now to think of ways to annoy him back. Not that he didn’t think that I annoyed him already. Poor Jackie. He had no idea what I could do if I put my mind to it. But there was a time for everything.
We disembarked in San Diego to blue skies, the imagined smell of the ocean, and a slowly falling sun. I liked San Diego. I liked the cold, salty ocean, the wet sand, Old Town, the Gaslamp Quarter, the seals flapping and snorting seawater. It was a great place to visit, a great place to live if you could afford it, and apparently a great place to drop a bread crumb. That face, that name, their plans . . . someone had visited the aquarium in Vegas and stared at a particular shark through the glass—and that someone had ended up here. They had good taste.
Maybe I could pack in a minivacation while scooping up a tiny portion of the Light. I ignored the diesel fumes on the tarmac and turned toward the ocean. It wasn’t in view, but I could imagine it. Now, if I actually could get to see it and eat seafood on the docks, it would be a great day. A fabulous day.
I wasn’t holding my breath.
“Where is the next step?” Mr. Trinity said behind me, his voice the drip of a frigid icicle. I’d be willing to bet his greatest regret was that he hadn’t been born in the time of the Inquisition or witch burning. Not that Eden House was Catholic . . . they were an order of their own making, unknown by the public, unaffiliated, and were around before BC clicked over to AD. Ancient indeed.
“I’m not exactly sure. Sharks aren’t as verbal in their communication as people, even with the Light’s help. It took me a while to get his name, Butch—so imaginative—but I can’t get a last name. But I did get this general location. . . . I know he’s here. Somewhere. I’m just not exactly sure where.” I saw it again, a blurry vision of the man through water and a thick layer of glass. Almost unwillingly he’d put his hand up to the glass and the shark had rested its blunt nose on the other side. The trail to the Light had passed. The picture was waving in my head like seaweed—a man, not a very attractive one. He looked like the kind of man who’d toss a hair dryer into his ancient mother’s bathtub to get a measly inheritance—just enough to buy a truly gorgeous guitar. He’d find a band, then, who would take him. They’d all see. I could see the frayed towels, the rubbery flowers on the bottom of the tub to keep the elderly from slipping. A big ratty hair dryer from the eighties bought for twenty-five cents at a yard sale. A smirking grandson who’d kill a neighborhood cat if he could catch it. Sparks flying. The lights going out.
I’m known for my imagination.
Then again, knowing he was in a band wasn’t my imagination. The shark told me that, the Light told me that, the same as it told me to go here. So it could be that Grandma had shuffled off her mortal coil just as I pictured it.
Butch’s smirk in the aquarium had been combined with dyed black hair, a narrow face, weasel eyes, and silver canine teeth flashing in an uneasy grimace as the smirk slid away. Hard to blame him. It wasn’t every day a shark shoved something into your brain. Drugs, it had to be the drugs; I could hear the echo of the thought through the Light. He moved away from the glass, snarling and showing those inlaid silver ca nines again. See? Look at me. It’s just a stupid shark. I’m not scared of it or the cold, saltwater thoughts in my head.
I saw him brush by a man with a two-year-old tucked in his arms. The little boy looked at the silver teeth and whimpered. “Bogeyman.”
Oh, sugar, I thought with sympathetic amusement, not hardly. Here’s hoping that’s the worst thing you see in your life, that pathetic monster wannabe.
“We need to go that way.” I pointed. “Toward the Gaslamp Quarter. He’s there somewhere.”
“Can you be a little more specific?” Goodman spoke up stiffly for the first time in forty minutes. Dressed in a suit an undertaker would’ve found darkly grim, with washed-out blue eyes and hair neither brown nor blond, he barely looked like a human being at all. More of a wax figure that didn’t make the grade and was tossed to molder in Madame Tussaud’s basement. In every way, he was far more frightening than the wannabe with the black hair and silver teeth. That guy had an identity, as pathetic as it was. Goodman looked like an identity vampire. Like he would suck up the essence of everything that made you you, to fill up the hollow figure he was . . . fill up what he was missing inside. What was he missing? From the looks of him and the shimmer of what seemed like almost a vacuum around him, that might just be every single thing that made a human human.
“I’m not a bloodhound. Get me closer and hopefully I’ll get more specific. Or the Light will.”
By the time the hired car took us to the Gaslamp Quarter, I did have it narrowed down. Unfortunately it wasn’t in one of the great seafood restaurants, but rather the looming presence of Petco Stadium. There was a concert coming up in two hours and the teenagers were already rowdy, shouting and cursing good-naturedly as the line curved around the stadium.
Goodman flashed his ID—CIA, FBI, Homeland Security; whatever Eden House provided him with got us through the door and past the crowds. I took the lead, a glowing thread reeling me in. I walked through the circular halls and past security guards and bodyguards, all who stepped back as if whatever laminated card Goodman continued to flash was kryptonite. Several bands were playing here tonight and our goth emo-imitation monster from the aquarium was no doubt in one of them. Finally reaching a door relatively untrampled by headset-wearing men and women who seemed frantic just for the love of the emotion, I opened the door without knocking. No one would’ve heard me anyway. It was a party. Drugs, alcohol, and underage girls galore. I grabbed a beer from a table and waded in. I looked over my shoulder to see that Mr. Trinity and his entourage had decided to wait in the hall out of the crush. Wimps. Demons they’d take on. Sweaty, half-naked, puking groupies were a little too much for them.
I moved through the room, ears deafened by bad music—this band’s music. Had to be. I came to an unconscious guy on the floor and bent for a closer look. Not my guy, not Butch. I stepped over him and kept going. I finally found the weasel on a couch with four women, two sandwiched on either side of him. He looked unbearably smug and rapacious. He thought he was a predator surrounded by his prey—a ferret with small, silver fangs.
Since the couch was full, I plopped on his lap and flashed him a smile, wide, sexy, and stupid as they came. “Hi.” I had to fit in with everyone else for the few seconds this was going to take. I needed him to hold still. The passing of the way to the Light was dis orienting. I didn’t need him having a shark/aquarium flashback and freaking out. Then I’d have to knock him unconscious and that was more work than I wanted to invest in.
“Hey,” he said back, trying to fake being bored and cool during our scintillating, monosyllabic conversation.
I reached a hand up and touched his hair as if I were going to comb my fingers through the limp strands. Instead, I clamped my fingers on the curve of his skull and let the shining bit of Light pass into me. It poured out of the drug-soaked brain into mine. It was like before, running to the edge of the cliff and jumping, arms spread. Flying for a split second, and then falling. Falling and falling. Forever. On top of whatever drugs he was on, it had to be ten times worse for him than for me. His mouth dropped open. He gurgled, then started to yell. I slammed my hand over the chapped, cracked lips of his mouth. Kissing him would’ve been more convincing to those around us.